Kick.Bio

• Jfry Craig

• Born : Nov 27, 1975
• Media : paint, installations, new media
• Lives : Calgary, AB.
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• Jfry Craig is a Calgary-based artist whose photos, paintings, mixed media and new media installations have appeared across Canada, the United States and Mexico.

• He has a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing from the University of Calgary where he studied under Canadian writer Nicole Markotic, govenor general winner Fred Wah and New England poet Jim Scrimgeour.

  
  

  Jfry’s installation work opened the 2007 Canada Week Celebrations in Monterrey, Mexico as well as the Inaugural StemCell Festival in Edmonton Alberta. His canvas prints were features in the Smythsonian’s exhibit, “Graphic Noise” which was currated by Laura Moody and traveled the US for 2 years after being MODA’s largest opening show. Jfry published “War Made Me [do it]” in 2005, which features his series of prints that explores war over the last century.
  
  

  Jfry was the guest artist at this year’s AMAAS conference where he presented on the history and future of the internet. His web project “Appul” was featured in Persistence of Vision, which was showing as part of the Eastern Edge Video Screening Series, presented in collaboration with The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery in Newfoundland. Jfry presents workshops and is a frequent guest speaker on the topics of new media script writing, narrative potential and design after the blog. This site is a collection of his web experiments and project notes.
  
  

  If you are looking to contact Jfry for a speaking engagement, a commissioned piece, gallery inquiry or a media request please email him at: theboy@toqueboy.com
  
  
  Join Jfry on Facebook at www.facebook.com/toqueboy

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• John Boletta

• Born : Oct 31, 1974
• Media : ink, aerosol paint, acrylic
• Lives : Calgary, AB
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• John Boletta is a Canadian artists who draws his inspiration from equal parts ancient Asian travel scrolls and modern handstyles. His elegant brush work forms the basis for his signature bonsai trees. John's work has appeared in Western Canadian galleries and is a name that is growing among Canadian collectors.

• John Boletta est un artiste Canadien qui s’inspire de part et d’autre de parchemins Asiatiques et des styles calligraphiques modernes. Son travail minutieux du pinceau et de l’encre forme la base de ses arbres bonsaï qui sont sa signature. L’art de John a été présenté dans plusieurs galeries d’art de l’ouest canadien et son nom est de plus en plus connu parmi les collecteurs canadiens.

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• Abby Fong

• Born : 06 August 1983
• Media : painter & illustrator: drawing ink, acrylic, aerosol
• Lives : Calgary, AB
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• Abby Fong is a Calgarian illustrator; her work is emotional and lets you into the small personal cracks in people's lives. The fine lines and bright colours create complex textured images where you can almost see into the artist's mind and experience her reality. The pieces are open and tender.

• Abby Fong est une illustratrice canadienne. Ses morceau sont émouvant et laisse l’observateur entrer dans les crevasses personnelles de la vie de ses personnages. Ces fines lignes et superbes couleurs créent des images où l’on peut presque percevoir les pensées de l’artiste et expérimenter sa réalité.

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• Conz

• Born : N/A
• Media : painter: aerosol, ink and acrylic
• Lives : Canada
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• Conz' work is vibrant, filled with harsh images that make some look away. His dense paintings tell stories of the inner city (dancers, drugs, guns, violence) and explore the visual tale of a deaf man's journey through the streets. There isn't a whole lot of guess work when you confront his graffiti based style and explicit subject matter.

• Les créations de Conz sont vibrants, remplis d’images provocantes qui peuvent empêcher certains de continuer leur observation . Ces peintures intenses racontent des histoires de racailles urbaines (danseuses, drogues, pistolets, violence) et explorent le conte visuel du périple d’un homme sourd à travers les rues. Il n’y a pas de quoi deviner lors d’une contemplation de son style issue du graffiti et la nature explicite de ses sujets.

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• Tim Rechner

• Born :
• Media : Painting and drawing
• Lives : Edmonton
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• After living in Vancouver, Montreal and Halifax, Tim Rechner has been in Edmonton working as a full time artist since 2001. Rechner studied art at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, working in the mediums of painting, drawing, installation and film. Tim Rechner is inspired by the uninhibited process with which young children create art and aspires to create similar pure aesthetic expressions with brushes and other mark making tools.
   
  Suite à Vancouver, Montréal et Halifax, Tim Rechner s'est installé à Edmonton travaillant en tant qu'artiste à temps plein depuis 2001. Rechner a étudié l'art au Collège d'art et de Design de la Nouvelle-Écosse, étudiant des médiums tels que la peinture, le dessin, l'installation et le film. Tim Rechner s'inspire du procédé sans inhibitions avec lequel les enfants créent de l'art et aspire à la création d'expressions d'esthétique pure similaires avec des pinceaux et une panoplie d'autres instruments.

• artist statement

  I work in a free, instinctive way in the mediums of drawing and painting. Explosive, frenzied, chaotic visual energy is the core component of the work I produce. Impulse and intuition play key roles in my process. While I utilize a stream of consciousness approach in mapping out my composition and applying surges of color, to state that this work is a complete and direct expression of subconscious action would be untrue. The art produced is instead the result of a collaboration between the subconscious and conscious minds as contemplative aesthetic response often plays an important role in the creation of the artwork.

  My installations explore unions and juxtapositions of painting and drawing as well as foreground and background within the gallery setting. I create environments that are charged with electric slashes of brushwork, line and color. What is constructed is a visually dominating, architectural, abstract language of floor to ceiling aesthetic mayhem with very little negative space.

  Throughout the past ten years I have extensively studied abstract expressionist sources from the New York school of the 1940’s and 1950’s. I have always been drawn to dynamic, emotive mark making and the more physical side of abstract painting and drawing. Having been an active contributor to the Edmonton visual arts scene for nearly six years, I am well aware of the strong tradition of formalist color field painting that is prevalent within this city. The University of Alberta painting department as well as many established Edmonton painters have immortalized Clement Greenberg theory. In this aesthetic climate, Barnett Newman and Clifford Still have been favoured abstract painting sources. The Emma Lake workshops in northern Saskatchewan during the 1960’s and 1970’s had a profound influence on painters in many western Canadian cities, especially Edmonton. I however have looked more upon abstract expressionist sources such as Gorky, de Kooning, Pollock, Matta, Motherwell and Kline. My artwork has also drawn heavily on Twombly, Rauschenberg, Basquiat, Riopelle and Borduas. I value the passion and poetry with which these artists created work. Similar qualities of emotive, chaotic, impulse make my work quite unique among artists in Alberta.

  These same dynamic qualities attract my eye to artwork produced by young children (particularly under the age of five). Over the past few years I have began accumulating a large resource library of such artwork. I am in awe of the raw, reckless, spontaneous courage and confidence that young children naturally possess when facing a painting or drawing surface.

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